A Brief History of Cryptography

 by:-Sara ahmed

cryptography

krɪpˈtɒɡrəfi/

noun

noun: cryptography

1. The art of writing or solving code.

 

The earliest form of cryptography was the simple writing of a message, as most people could not read (New World, 2007). In fact, the very word cryptography comes from the Greek words kryptos and graphein, which mean hidden and writing, respectively (Pawlan, 1998).

The need to conceal messages has been with us since we moved out of caves, started living in groups and decided to take this civilization idea seriously. As soon as there were different groups or tribes, the idea that we had to work against each other surfaced and was proliferated, along with rank violence, secrecy, and crowd manipulation. The earliest forms of cryptography were found in the cradle of civilization, which comes as no surprise, including the regions currently encompassed by Egypt, Greece and Rome.

The Greek’s idea was to wrap a tape around a stick, and then write the message on the wound tape. When the tape was unwound, the writing would be meaningless. The receiver of the message would of course have a stick of the same diameter and use it to decipher the message. The Roman method of cryptography was known as the Caesar Shift Cipher. It utilized the idea of shifting letters by an agreed upon number (three was a common historical choice), and thus writing the message using the letter-shift.